Creationist Arguments: Orce Man

Gish (1985) tells the story of "Orce Man", a fossil discovered in 1982 near
the Spanish town of Orce and claimed to be a human cranial fragment. The
fossil comes from the Venta Micena site, and is designated VM-0. A
symposium on it was planned for late May, 1984. Earlier that month, says
Gish (citing a UPI news report from May 14, 1984):

"When French experts revealed the fact that "Orce Man" was most likely a
skull fragment from a four-month-old donkey, embarrassed Spanish
authorities sent out 500 letters cancelling invitations to the symposium."

Two French scientists had suggested the fragment "may have come" from a
donkey. Another scientist quoted in the news report admitted there was
some doubt as to the bone's identity, but thought it was still quite likely
human. A third scientist quoted in another news report from Associated
Press claimed it was definitely humanoid. Instead of it being a "fact"
that the fragment is "most likely" a donkey, a fairer assessment would be
that it was still unidentified, but possibly an equid (not necessarily a
donkey).

By the next paragraph, Gish is exaggerating even further, and is calling
the disputed fragment a "donkey's skull". It is not a skull, and it was
not necessarily from a donkey.

It is easy to score cheap rhetorical points by implying that scientists are
so incompetent that they cannot tell the difference between a human and a
donkey. A more charitable explanation, which turns out to be the correct
one, is that the bone is genuinely difficult to identify, as proved by the
fact that debate over its status has continued for over 10 years.

A fractal analysis of the skull sutures by Gibert and Palmqvist (1995)
strongly indicated that the fragment was not from an equine. Also in 1995,
an international symposium was eventually held at Orce to discuss this and
other material, and a number of workers there also suggested that VM-0 was
a hominid fossil (Zihlman and Lowenstein 1996).

Two articles appearing in July 1997 disputed that claim, however.
Palmqvist (1997), citing errors in the paper that he had coauthored with
Gibert, now claimed that the fractal evidence was clearly in favor of an
equid origin for VM-0, and Moya-Sola and Kohler (1997) made the same claim
based on an anatomical study. Even this has not resolved the debate,
because a later paper (Borja et al. 1997) has argued in favor of VM-0 being
a hominid, based on immunological studies of fossil proteins performed at
two independent laboratories. For now, it would seem safest to make no
firm conclusions about the identity of VM-0 or the other possible hominid
fossils from Orce.

"Orce Man" is important because, if valid, it would be the earliest human
fossil in Europe. In most circumstances, such a scrappy fossil would have
received little attention. Some mistakes were made in its analysis, but
that is an inevitable result of the scientific process, especially when the
evidence is so ambiguous. Importantly, scientists have continued to work
to answer the doubts about the fossils. And, whatever the status of the
fossils, they do not affect the validity of the rest of the evidence for
human evolution.

The location of the Orce fragment on a child's skull - assuming, that is, that the
fossil does actually come from a human. (From the March 1996 edition of
Investigacion y Ciencia)